Basutoland

Basutoland—home of the Basotho people—has been under the nominal control of the Cape Colony (of the British Empire) since 1871 (it had beena British protectorate from 1868 until 1871), but the territory has remained essentially autonomous in the early years of colonial rule, with traditional Basotho authorities wielding effective power.

Only in the late 1870s had Cape authorities attempted to consolidate power over the region and enforce its laws.

Basutholand, an independent state as recently as 1868, chafes under the new restrictions and attempts to reduce the authority of its chiefs.

Matters had come to a head in 1879, when Governor Henry Bartle Frere had reserved part of Basutoland for white settlement and demanded that all natives surrender their firearms to Cape authorities under the 1879 Peace Protection Act.

The Cape government of Sir John Gordon Sprigg has set April 1880 as the date for surrendering weapons.

Although some Basotho, with great reluctance, are willing to surrender their guns, the majority refuse; government attempts to enforce the law bring fighting by September.

Within months, most Basotho chiefs are in open rebellion.

Colonial Cape forces sent to put down the rebellion suffer heavy casualties, as the Basotho have obtained serviceable firearms from the Orange Free State and enjoy a natural defensive advantage in their country's mountainous terrain.

The rebels rely primarily on guerrilla warfare, ambushing isolated units to negate the British/Cape superiority in firepower.

In October, Basotho forces ambush a mounted column of British Army lancers at Qalabani (present-day Lancers Gap, near Maseru), killing thirty-nine.

The defeat of an experienced and well-armed cavalry column discourages Cape authorities.

The costs of the war, when added to the earlier war with the Xhosa and renewed troubles in the Transkei, are dragging the Cape Colony towards bankruptcy.

The war is also becoming increasingly unpopular, and the Sprigg government is replaced by the Thomas Scanlen government.

A peace treaty is signed with Basotho chiefs in 1881, in which colonial authorities concede most of the points in dispute.

The land remains in Basotho hands and the nation enjoys unrestricted access to firearms in exchange for a national one-time indemnity of five thousand cattle.

However, unrest continues and it quickly becomes clear that Cape Town cannot control the territory.

The British government returns Basutoland to Crown colony status in 1884, granting internal self-government in the process.

With effective power once again firmly with the chiefs, the conflict subsides.

Africans participate actively in the new industrial economy.

Thousands had come to Kimberley in the early 1870s, some to obtain diamond claims, the majority to seek jobs in the mines and thereby to acquire the cash that would enable them to rebuild cattle herds depleted by drought, disease, and Boer raids.

n the early 1870s, an average of fifty thousand men a year had migrated to work in the mines, usually for two to three months, returning home with guns purchased in Kimberley, as well as cattle and cash.

Many who lived in the area of the diamond finds had chosen to sell agricultural surpluses, rather than their labor, and to invest their considerable profits in increasing production for the growing urban market.

African farmers in British Basutoland (the British protectorate established in Lesotho), the Cape, and Natal had also greatly expanded their production of foodstuffs to meet rising demand throughout southern Africa, and out of this development has emerged a relatively prosperous peasantry supplying the new towns of the interior as well as the coastal ports.

The growth of Kimberley and other towns also provide new economic opportunities for Cape Coloureds, many of whom are skilled tradesmen, and for Indians, who, once they had completed their contracts on the sugar plantations, establish shops selling goods to African customers.

Mineowners struggling to make a profit in the early days of the diamond industry had sought, however, to undercut the bargaining strength of the Africans on whom they depended for labor.

In 1872 Kimberley's white claimsholders had persuaded the British colonial administration to introduce a pass law.

This law, the foundation of the twentieth-century South African pass laws, required that all "servants" be in possession of passes that stated whether the holders were legally entitled to work in the city, whether or not they had completed their contractual obligations, and whether they could leave the city.

The aim of this law, written in "color-blind" language but enforced against blacks only, was to limit the mobility of migrant workers, who had frequently changed employers or left the diamond fields in a constant (and usually successful) attempt to bargain wages upward.

Other restrictions have followed the pass law.

These include the establishment of special courts to process pass law offenders as rapidly as possible (the basis of segregated courts in the twentieth century), the laying out of special "locations" or ghettos in Kimberley where urban blacks had to live (the basis of municipal segregation practices), and, finally, in 1886 the formation of "closed compounds," fenced and guarded institutions in which all black diamond mine workers have to live for the duration of their labor contracts.

The institutionalization of such discriminatory practices has produced in Kimberley the highest rate of incarceration and the lowest living standards for urban blacks in the Cape Colony.

It also marks a major turnabout in the British administration of law.

The previous official policy that all people irrespective of color be treated equally, while still accepted in legal theory, is now largely ignored in judicial practice.

South Africa's first industrial city has thus developed into a community in which discrimination has become entrenched in the economic and social order, not because of racial antipathies formed on the frontier, but because of the desire for cheap labor.

Because blacks in southern Africa will not put up with such conditions if they can maintain an autonomous existence on their own lands, the British had embarked on a large-scale program of conquest in the 1870s and the 1880s.

Mine owners argue that if they do not get cheap labor their industries will become unprofitable.

White farmers, English- and Dutch-speaking alike, interested in expanding their own production for new urban markets, cannot compete with the wages paid at the mines and demand hat blacks be forced to work for them.

They argue that if blacks have to pay taxes in cash and that if most of their lands are confiscated, they will then have to seek work on the terms that white employers chosoe to offer.

As a result of such pressures, the British have fought wars against the Zulu, the Griqua, the Tswana, the Xhosa, the Pedi, and the Sotho, conquering all but the last.

By the middle of the 1880s, the majority of the black African population of South Africa that had still been independent in 1870 had been defeated, the bulk of their lands had been confiscated and given to white settlers, and taxes had been imposed on the people, who are now forced to live on rural "locations."

In order to acquire food to survive and to earn cash to pay taxes, blacks now have to migrate to work on the farms, in the mines, and in the towns of newly industrialized South Africa.

The final quarter of the nineteenth century in Southern Africa is marked also by the rise of new forms of political and religious organization as blacks struggle to attain some degree of autonomy in a world that is rapidly becoming colonized.

Because the right to vote is based on ownership of property rather than on race in the Cape, blacks can participate in electoral politics, and this they do in increasing numbers in the 1870s and the 1880s,   especially in the towns.

In 1879 Africans in the eastern Cape had formed the Native Educational Association (NEA), the purpose of which is to promote "the improvement and elevation of the native races."

This had been followed by the establishment of the more overtly political Imbumba Yama Nyama (literally, "hard, solid sinew"), formed in 1882 in Port Elizabeth, which seeks to fight for "national rights" for Africans.

John Tengo Jabavu, a mission-educated teacher and vice president of the NEA, had founded his own newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (Native Opinion) in 1884.

Jabavu uses the newspaper as a forum through which to express African grievances about the pass laws; "location" regulations; the unequal administration of justice; and what are considered "anti-native" laws, such as the one passed in 1887 by the Cape Parliament at Rhodes's behest that had raised the property qualification for voters and had stricken twenty thousand Africans off the rolls.

Through these organizations and newspapers, and others like them established in the late nineteenth century, Africans protest their unequal treatment, pointing out in particular contradictions between the theory and practice of British colonialism.

They call for the eradication of discrimination and for the incorporation of Africans into colonial society on an equal basis with Europeans.

By the end of the nineteenth century, after property qualifications have again been raised in 1892, there are only about eight thousand Africans on the Cape's voting roll.